Just as there's more than one way to skin a wabbit –- er, rabbit -– there's more than one way to spell the Libyan leader's name. All of the spellings are transliterations from Arabic, and so all are interpretations.

The L.A. Times has used Kadafi since 1969, when the colonel seized power. The LAT's first comprehensive stylebook, printed in 1979, explained the reasoning:

Khadafi, Kadafy, Qadafi, Kadafi:

These varying transliterations of the name of the Libyan leader sum up many of The Times' problems with Arabic. They represent different, though similar, pronunciations.

For The Times' purposes, let us make it Kadafi, and let us apply the same principle to other Arab names:

a k rather than a kh or a q

an i rather than a y

(This also explains The Times' spelling of Koran, as opposed to AP's preferred spelling, Quran.)

Over on the Opinion L.A. blog, Paul Whitefield points out that The Times is in the minority in its spelling. The winner in Google hits? Wikipedia’s spelling: Muammar al-Gaddafi.

Maybe ScrewyWabbit was on to something.

--Deirdre Edgar

[For the record, Feb. 23: An earlier version of this post misspelled the New York Times' spelling of el-Qaddafi as el-Quaddafi.]